parked there like invisible brick upon the air in front of their noses.

The preferred colours, to these figures, being:

blacks, silver and grey, and many differing forms of navy,

all hinting at mortality; wannabe Homers all, exiled from the azure.

While their women march, stride and amble along in boots

of every form, a fetishist’s kingdom. Knowing that us men

are visual creatures they tame us with their eunuchs

into obedience through our eyes. O rich silken ambiguity,

the hooves, a glimpse under the table, with Mathew,

muscular calves of the harlequins, those boys…

“Where’s my husband?” A tourist shouts up in alarm.

Here we are, exiled like Ovid, back in Ireland.

In the land of the barbarians. The first thing that strikes you

is the bloody cold. A fucking rock in the Atlantic,

battered and embittered. After Rome, t’is very plain fare,

all alcohol and misery and new money.

The only part of Rome you see here

is the influence of the Vatican.

Then one day from the turntable the baroque sounds

of the sixties grabs you by the juggler,

and the leather cocksman introduces you to the vineyard.

And with him you enter into a Greek world;

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Dionysus through Euripides.

This Bachhic splendour lends some warmth to your days,

your teenage mind crucified by the Sunday’s spent upon your knees.

Next comes Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy.

You are seventeen, eighteen. Such a rich, heady schooling for such tender years. You love this new, sensual, androgynous figure,

which you find totally compatible with Christ.

Let the dead bury the dead, turning water into wine.

Now you are spiralling towards your first, real encounters with sex

and it is all related with death; for you want to die a thousand times.

Far from disused sheds and churning butter,

we have far richer subject matter here.

Enter Oedipus, Freud and William Blake

and a certain path to some knowledge with the Crawling King Snake.

More than twenty years on, just exiting the dark pool,

and I have finally made my peace with the Northern school.

And in all this time what have I learned?

As regards content, the context which was requisite

was more temporal, rather than spatial, and necessarily, exquisite.

The point being, that here was a dead man

speaking to me from distant years and what he had to say

was more relevant to me than any of my peers.

So, rather take with me the collected works of Jim Morrison

than the magnum opus of any Nobel- Prize winning academician.

Whom we have met in the distant past.

Here is an example of such dead time.

This poem first appeared in The Galway Review, 2013.After dinner, the musicians climbed up onto the stage

Beethoven

For Christian Thielemann

Such phantasmagoria, this architecture

Aural, composed on mere air…

A metropolis, borne over on a forest of strings,

And woodwind, transporting the spirits –its freight-

Through a sublime, metaphysical cloud,

Bearing all manner of fortune with it,

And the enraptured company of the Gods,

As well as the Damned; brass and tympany,

Their texture, all the chorale of the ancients,

With floral brow, feasting with the barbarians

Who crowd in serpentine plumes, their dreams

Of elephant, a testament at the wonder of their malevolence

Which would be their life forever barred to us,

If not having these gates through which to enter.

This poem first appeared in The Galway Review 2013, and later reappearedLike a group of pregnant women. in The Elm Tree, Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2014.

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Peter O’ Neill was born in Cork in 1967. His debut collection Antiope (Stonesthrow Poetry) appeared in 2013, and to critical acclaim. ‘Certainly a voice to the reckoned with.’ Dr Brigitte Le JueZ (DCU). His second collection The Elm Tree was published by Lapwing (2014), ‘A thing of wonder to behold.’ Ross Breslin ( The Scum Gentry ). His third collection The Dark Pool is due to appear early in 2015 (mgv2publishing), and a fourth Dublin Gothic (Kilmog Press) is also due to appear early 2015.

As well as being a regular contributor to A New Ulster,The Scum Gentry, The Galway Review, Danse Macabre and mgv2publishing, his work has also appeared in: Abridged, Bone Orchard, Colony, Levure Littéraire, Outburst, Paysages Écrits and Poetry Bus. He has edited two publications for mgv2publishing: And Agamemnon dead. The Mauvaise Graine Anthology of Early Twenty First Century Irish Poetry (March, 2015), and Transverser issue 81 MGv2>datura – Transversions of Early Twenty First Century French Poetry. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature (DCU) and a BA in philosophy (DCU). He is currently working on his tenth collection.